The Devil's Dice

by Roz Watkins

  ‘I’m not sure that’s any way to speak to your superiors.’ But I took the book and started carefully flipping the pages.

  *

  Jai left me in peace and I read the last two entries of the diary in full.

  Was there ever a man as wretched as I? My business is in ruins; my family has turned against me; my glorious rhododendron gardens are gone; and my house now teeters on the edge of the quarry like an unfortunate soul contemplating taking his own life.

  I feel I am disintegrating before my own self. I know I am not long for this life, and today I have discovered the true cause. Our family is cursed, just as my grandmother told.

  I have taken to visiting a healer who resides in a cave in the woods to the south of Eldercliffe. This kind soul does not shun me as my family does, and she has prescribed herbs for my sickness.

  I have developed trust in this lady, and I believed she should possess all the facts. Therefore, I today mentioned the curse of which my grandmother spoke. Her face grew white, and she muttered under her breath and drew the sign of the cross.

  ‘I have heard of such curse,’ she said. ‘It is spoken of among healers, because we seem powerless against it. I will tell you what I know.’

  ‘Please continue,’ I said, and settled back on my stone bench with a terrible heaviness inside me.

  ‘Many generations ago,’ she said, ‘back in the times when there were witches in this land, a man accused his wife’s sister of being such a thing. It was a very grave accusation, but it was made by a respectable man of the village, a married man with eight children. And the woman’s own sister believed her husband, the accuser.

  ‘This village was near to a place known as the Labyrinth; a terrible, dark, underground place of caves and tunnels, which had never been fully mapped. It was custom in the village to take suspected witches to the Labyrinth, and to find a noose which hung deep within. If the noose could be found, it was decreed that the woman was a witch, and her initials would be discovered hewn into the cave wall behind. In this case, the witch would hang. If the noose could not be found, the woman would be declared innocent and left to find her own way out, although sadly most women did not succeed. The villagers took this particular young woman into the Labyrinth. They found the noose and she was hanged to death.’

  Not truly desiring to know the answer, I asked, ‘And the curse?’

  ‘The day after the woman was hanged, there was a strange occurrence. In this area, as you know, rocks jut from the ground in odd places, and one such rock the size of a small cart was situated outside the accuser’s house. When he woke the day after the hanging, a carving had appeared on the rock. An image of the Grim Reaper, his scythe held aloft, and under it the man’s wife and children.’

  I shuddered as I envisaged the man waking to find such a thing. ‘And that was the origin of the curse?’

  The healer could not meet my eye. ‘The man took a pick-axe and he hacked the stone to pieces, destroying the image and rendering the stone into a thousand fragments. But to no avail. His wife died young, as did many of his children. And his children’s children.’

  ‘That is my family?’ I whispered. ‘The family of the accuser?’

  ‘So it is told.’

  The next entry was a week later.

  After discovering the terrible news of our family curse, I raged against my fate. But now a certain calmness has come upon me. I have vowed to take my own life, although the healer begs me not to do so. She claims to have developed a fondness for me, and each day she makes a new potion to try to cure me. She has grown immensely thin, for which I feel deep regret. But I know what I must do. I will step from the cliff outside my own house.

  First, however, there is something I am obliged to undertake. Although my children no longer speak to me, the thought that they may too be afflicted with this curse is troubling me greatly. The healer has spoken to her spirit guides and they have told her how I may remove the curse from my family.

  I must carve a new image of the Grim Reaper. I must do it with care and diligence, no matter how long it shall take. I have decided I will practise in my own basement, and then I will carve it into the wall of the cave in order that I may spend my last times with the healer who has treated me with such kindness. When I am done, I shall be free to leave this world, and my children and their children’s children will be spared. And that is what I will do.

  I closed my eyes and sank back in my chair. I pictured the healer growing thinner and thinner as she prepared potion after potion, trying to save her friend. Did her presence somehow remain in the cave? Maybe the emaciated ghost was more than a trick of light and shadows.

  And I imagined poor Piers painting the awful image in his basement, and then hacking away at the cave wall, frantically trying to remove the curse from his family. To no avail.

  *

  I called the health centre and asked for Kate Webster, my mind full of the unsettling words from the diary. I wanted to know who else they’d told about Piers. The murderer had known about the tragedy or he wouldn’t have written In Piers’s bane on the mystery geocache clue. Obviously Kate Webster knew, but I didn’t think it was her. There would be much easier ways to dispatch your own husband, especially if you were a doctor. I wondered if Felix knew.

  Kate sounded exhausted. ‘Haven’t you found who did it yet?’

  ‘Who knew about the history of your house? About Piers Hamilton falling to his death?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, why?’

  ‘Well, it appears the murderer knew. Obviously you knew. According to the man in the bookshop, this was a pretty obscure piece of knowledge.’

  ‘Was it? I assumed lots of people knew it.’

  ‘No. So, you can see from my perspective this isn’t looking so good.’

  ‘What? You think I did it?’

  I didn’t think she’d done it. ‘Who else did you tell about the history of the house?’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know. We mentioned it at our house-warming. Close friends and family. I can’t remember telling anyone else, but I might have.’

  ‘Who was at the house-warming?’

  ‘Family-wise, there was Mark and Beth. And then work colleagues – Felix and Olivia, Edward and Grace. I think that was about it. I don’t know who else Peter told about the history, though. His dad probably, if he didn’t already know.’

  ‘And what if the curse is on the family, not the house? It’s just that the house stayed in the family. Can’t genetic diseases be regarded as family curses?’

  ‘There could be schizophrenia in Peter’s family,’ Kate said softly. ‘All the suicides at the house. The paranoia about the Grim Reaper. Is that the curse? Schizophrenia?’

  *

  After I put the phone down, it immediately started ringing. A message from Olivia: ‘I know I should have told you this before, but Felix lied about the Sunday night before Peter was killed. He went out about seven and got back about ten. And I don’t know where he was on the afternoon Beth died. Please don’t tell him I told you.’

  Chapter 31

  Felix leant back in the grey plastic chair and sighed, as if this was all far too tedious for him. ‘Nice bruises. What happened to you?’ His shiny-suited solicitor frowned at him.

  I ignored the question. I was glad we’d ended up in our most uncomfortable interview room – the one that was always too hot, with the buzzy fluorescent light that gave you a migraine, and the smell of teenage car-thieves’ old trainers and sex offenders’ laptops.

  Jai took Felix through the formal stuff, and sat back to let me conduct the interview.

  ‘You should be more careful,’ Felix said. ‘And just to let you know, I’m not happy about being shipped in here and grilled like a common criminal. Put a foot wrong and I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks.’ I had a mental image of him as a child at an expensive public school, twisting a smaller kid’s arm behind his back.

  ‘We’d like to know where you were the evening before Pe
ter Hamilton died.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t I tell you before?’

  ‘You lied to us before.’

  Shiny-Suit said, ‘If you don’t have any evidence, I suggest you release my client.’ Was that the best he could do for three hundred quid an hour?

  ‘We know you went out,’ I said. ‘And we have an earlier witness statement from you saying you stayed in. You’d better explain.’

  Felix was unnervingly still, like a cobra about to strike. ‘Has that faithless wife of mine grassed me up? I’ll have to deal with her.’

  I pictured Olivia’s bruised neck and felt a twinge of worry on her behalf. ‘Where were you?’

  He sighed. ‘All right. I didn’t tell you before because I thought you’d get all over-excited about it. Edward and I went in to the office to look through Peter’s work. To find out if he’d made any more stupendous cock-ups.’

  ‘Edward said he didn’t go out that night.’

  ‘Well, obviously, shock horror, he lied. We both agreed not to tell you. I’m sure if you confront him, he’ll come clean. He crumples under pressure.’

  ‘So Peter had been making mistakes which put you at serious financial risk?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘And now he’s out of the way and you have his life insurance money. How fortuitous.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘We know you pushed a young man off a roof to his death in Cambridge, didn’t call for help, and then covered it up. Peter Hamilton was threatening to come clean.’ We didn’t know that for sure but it was worth a try. ‘Yet another reason to want him out of the way. And what about Beth Hamilton? Where were you on Sunday afternoon?’

  Felix shuffled in his seat, apparently losing his cool for a moment. ‘I went out for a drive.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Round and about the lanes. I can’t remember exactly.’ The screen came back over his face and his voice was as arrogant and confident as ever. ‘You’re on a fishing expedition. You’ve no evidence I had anything to do with Peter’s death or that sister of his.’

  ‘Ever heard of Piers? Remember his middle name?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Really? Can anyone other than Edward verify where you were the night before Peter died, or on Sunday afternoon?’

  ‘Well, I told that bi—’ Shiny-Suit kicked Felix – actually booted him under the table, quite blatantly. Felix hesitated. ‘I told my lovely wife exactly where I was going. Both times. I’m disappointed she didn’t do me the favour of mentioning that.’

  ‘Mr Carstairs,’ I said. ‘If you so much as lay an aggressive finger on your wife, we’ll have you dragged in here in handcuffs faster than you can say Get me my lawyer, whether she wants to press charges or not.’

  Shiny-Suit swallowed, with dramatic Adam’s apple action. ‘Can I have a moment with my client, please?’

  *

  The brightness of the morning had disappeared but the wind remained, dragging sluggish dark clouds across the sky as I headed south to Edward Swift’s house. I noticed I was grinding my teeth. We needed more evidence.

  Edward greeted me with no enthusiasm and led me through to the kitchen. He sat me at the table and placed himself carefully opposite. There were no offers of coffee and he didn’t comment on my unorthodox, just-beaten-up look.

  ‘We have reason to believe you lied about your whereabouts on the Sunday evening before Peter’s death,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So, where were you?’

  He tapped his fingernails against the table and spoke rapidly. ‘I knew it was ridiculous to lie to you. It’s Felix – he can be very persuasive. We went in to the office. We were discussing one of Peter’s cases.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’d messed something up. We were… We were trying to put it right.’

  ‘Why all the secrecy then?’

  Edward looked as if he was about to burst into tears. ‘I knew we shouldn’t do it. I told Felix.’ He stood and walked to the patio door overlooking the fishpond.

  ‘What did you do?’

  Edward spun round and returned to the table. ‘Oh, I can’t lie any more. We were trying to cover up his mistake. Avoid the client realising. It happened during the period we had no insurance. It could have bankrupted us.’

  ‘You’d better tell me exactly what happened.’ I sat back in my chair as if I had all the time in the world.

  Edward took a breath like he was preparing for a free dive. ‘Peter missed the priority deadline for filing an international application. The client instructed him to do it by email and letter and Peter acknowledged and said it was all in hand, and then just didn’t do it. It only came to light when the client asked for a status update. It was too late to do anything.’

  I almost felt sorry for Edward. His face was damp with sweat.

  ‘So, it was serious then? Peter had made a bad mistake? With big financial consequences?’

  ‘Yes. And it got worse. Felix persuaded us not to tell the client. We filed an international application as soon as we found out. Tried to claim priority but we knew it would be rejected. We were too late. But they weren’t the sort of clients who would check up on what we told them. They hadn’t actually disclosed the invention, so the later date could still be okay, as long as no one else had filed a similar application in the meantime. So, we kept quiet and prayed.’

  ‘But it turned out someone had filed a similar application?’

  ‘It was awful. A direct competitor had filed something almost identical after our original priority date but before the filing date of our International. That evening, Felix and I were in the office arguing about what to do. Peter and I wanted to come clean but Felix wanted to fabricate some earlier prior art and persuade the client to withdraw the case based on that.’

  ‘What effect would that have had?’

  ‘It would have made it seem that the invention was unpatentable anyway, regardless of our mistake. Because someone else had already done it, even before the original priority date. They hadn’t, of course. Felix was going to make something up.’

  ‘So, he wanted to commit fraud?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. It was a big-money case. Pharmaceuticals. And to make matters worse, early trials had been promising.’ Edward put his head in his hands. ‘It’s such a mess. I’ve realised while we were all running around being busy, thinking everything was going well, Peter seems to have been going quietly mad. We trusted each other. It’s only a small firm. We have systems but they only work if everyone behaves sensibly and uses them.’

  ‘How long were you in the office that evening?’

  ‘From about seven to about nine thirty.’

  ‘So your wife lied when she said you were watching TV with her?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, it’s not her fault. I asked her to.’

  ‘And were you with Felix the whole time?’

  ‘No, I was in Peter’s room but Felix went to our Records department for about an hour. Working out what he could get away with.’

  ‘So, he could have left the building?’

  ‘I suppose so. I saw him at about seven thirty and then again at about eight thirty to nine.’

  ‘Okay. Thank you. Do you know if Peter mentioned his mistake to anyone else? His sister was a lawyer. Would he have discussed it with her?’

  ‘Probably. Are you going to report us?’ He squeezed his eyebrows together and gave me a beseeching look.

  ‘Look, it’s not my main focus. But I strongly suggest you come clean to the client.’

  Edward slumped in his chair and exhaled. ‘Yes, we will. Of course. I knew we should.’

  ‘Good. I just need to ask you a couple of other things. Do you remember Peter telling you the story about the Victorian who built their house, and committed suicide?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Did you mention it to anyone else?’

  ‘No. Why?’<
br />
  ‘Are you familiar with geocaching?’

  ‘Yes. I used to do it with Peter and Felix sometimes.’

  ‘Did you ever log into the geocaching website?’

  ‘No. Peter always did that.’

  ‘Did you know his password?’

  ‘Of course not. What’s this about?’

  ‘Did you see Peter log in to the website?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, you or Felix could have seen his password?’

  ‘Why would I care about his geocaching password? But yes, either of us could have seen it, I suppose, if we’d wanted to.’ He froze and looked me in the eye, the first time he’d done that. ‘Do you think Felix might have killed Peter?’

  I didn’t answer.

  I stood and put my notes in my bag. I noticed a pile of books on the kitchen table. The top one was called To Train Up a Child. I felt a shiver of revulsion. I’d read about that book. It advocated ‘training’ children through a system of severe and escalating violence. I couldn’t imagine for a moment they’d brought Alex up that way. ‘Is that yours?’ I asked.

  Edward snatched the book and shoved it into a drawer in the kitchen table. ‘Oh, good heavens, I told her to put it away. I don’t want people thinking we believe in that nonsense.’

  I gave him a questioning look.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Grace had a few… issues. She’s been seeing a therapist.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, if you’re interested, Grace’s parents followed the teaching of a particular preacher when they brought her up.’ Edward seemed relieved to be talking about something other than fraudulent patenting activities. ‘It was before that book, but very similar. Her therapist asked to see the book, to understand more about the way her parents acted. You know what therapists are like. It’s always about your childhood.’

  Oh yes, I knew that for sure.

  ‘How awful. I’m sorry. Are her parents still alive?’